MediaWiki-General log from 2013-03-20

[18:41:13] <jeremyb_> qgil: let me know if there's a particular meeting where you want meetbot. i have one i can start pretty easily but it's not set up too well. will work on setting it up better sometime in the next week
[18:42:49] <qgil> jeremyb_, it could be useful in the IRC sprints we do for https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Weekly_goals
[18:43:12] <aude> wm2012 bot can reappear :)
[18:43:21] <qgil> jeremyb_, I'm actually surprised that a IRC heavy community like this doesn't have it already. Maybe others will adopt it when they see it in action
[18:43:28] * aude found the bot useful\x01
[18:43:33] <jeremyb_> aude: :-)
[18:43:45] <jeremyb_> aude: maybe we should change the name though
[18:43:49] <aude> yeah
[18:44:38] <qgil> jeremyb_, aude I don't have a preference about bots. You know what MeetBot does. :)
[18:45:10] <jeremyb_> qgil: nick?
[18:45:39] <aude> qgil: wm2012 was/is a meetbot, used for our wikimania planning meetings
[18:45:45] <aude> and other stuff
[18:45:46] <qgil> jeremyb_, :) MeetBot?
[18:46:46] <qgil> aude, happy to see that everything is in place already
[18:48:17] <jeremyb_> qgil: errr, but that's taken, right?
[18:49:03] <qgil> jeremyb_, mmm wm-meetbot :) As you see I'm trying hard to be not-original
[18:49:41] <jeremyb_> ok...
[18:49:51] * aude thinks that would work\x01

Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:

No objections to a trial run as long as you can control the bot and stop others from abusing it. :)

How would you abuse it? I expect no need for preemptive protections. If it's a problem we'll deal with it.

Greg just asked me whather we have a MeetBot and (accurately, I believe) I answered that no, but yes, but no. :)

All this to say that there is another potential customer, CCed now here.

The good folks of OpenStack are using meetbot as well:

Their doc: http://ci.openstack.org/meetbot.html
Fork: https://github.com/openstack-infra/meetbot
Puppet module doc: http://ci.openstack.org/puppet_modules.html#meetbot-puppet-module
Puppet module: https://github.com/openstack-infra/config/tree/master/modules/meetbot

So I guess all it takes is integrating that on some labs instance :-)

Note that Meetbot is a plugin of Supybot python IRC bot. I am not sure anyone has been using it yet.

QA style...

For users

When I join #wikimedia-meetbot IRC channel
When I write #startmeeting
When I write #action Oh this is my first meeting ever. Awesome
When I write #endmeeting

Then meetbot-wm gives me some URL

When I click the URL
Then I am given the above log.

Example outputs:

Meeting report http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/wikimedia-meetbot.2013-09-26-12.54.html
Formatted IRC log: http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/wikimedia-meetbot.2013-09-26-12.54.log.html

GIVE IT A TRY !!!!!!!!!!

For admins

When the bot is dead
and I connect to integration-meetbot.pmtpa.wmflabs
and I enter the command 'sudo restart meetbot'
Then the bot is revived.

On integration-meetbot.pmtpa.wmflabs instance:

Logs:

• published logs are under /mnt/public
• bot logs are in /mnt/supybot/logs.

Conf:

• Meetbot in /mnt/meetbot/MeetBot/meetingLocalConfig.py
• Supybot in /mnt/supybot/meetbot-wm.conf

I am too lazy to puppetize this right now and get ops to merge the change in :-D But at least you now have a meetbot instance to play with.

(In reply to comment #6)

GIVE IT A TRY !!!!!!!!!!

BIG THANK YOU!

The Engineering Community Team will give it a try soon and we will report back.

The Multimedia team held a daily checkin yesterday:

IRC log: http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/wikimedia-meetbot.2013-09-26-16.59.log.html

Report: http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/wikimedia-meetbot.2013-09-26-16.59.html

Mark Holqmist sent a report on the engineering mailing list:

I just dragged the Multimedia team into that channel to test it out at
our daily scrum meeting, with qualified success.

• We needed to use #info and other things more (lesson for other teams)
• Running a standup with it could be more automated - maybe e3bot could be told how to run a standup meeting? (ori-l? spage?)
• The logs [0] are specific to our meeting, so we don't have to dig for them. Awesome!
• The #meetingname command [1] had nil effect - it would be nice to implement it in the filenamePattern config for our instance if we move forward with this.
• The logs maybe highlight /^\S*:/ as a highlighting action. This seems unnecessary and, clearly in this case, inaccurate. At least something to be aware of. (see where Bryan and I said "Yesterday: ")

Mark references:

[0] http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/wikimedia-meetbot.2013-09-26-16.59.log.html
[1] http://meetbot.debian.net/Manual.html#less-used-commands

More experiments from Multimedia team standup: http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/wikimedia-meetbot.2013-09-27-17.01.html

The team is not convinced that minutes from a standup are truly a good/useful idea, but it's a nice format for experimentation with the tool.

Having used MeetBot in the past I also think that maybe it's too heavy/structured for a daily meeting of a small team. When it shines is on bigger meetings with more participation and a bigger risk of having a too unstructured / non-productive discussion.

In such cases MeetBot forces you to organize topics, and annotate points and actions for the minutes. It also provides information about who attended and was active, which is useful to give a first impression about how the meeting went without having to dig through the full log (which is also conveniently provided).

This is truly messy! http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/
Any way to sort stuff my the channel it happened in?

(In reply to comment #12)

This is truly messy!
http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/2013/
Any way to sort stuff my the channel it happened in?

By channel you mean... the #wikimedia-meetbot IRC channel?

imho it is the task of every source to keep their links to their logs organized in their own team wiki pages.

"EXPERIMENTAL !!!! Logs will be deleted randomly ..."

Since we are hosting official meetings at #wikimedia-meetbot, how can we help pushing this report to RESOLVED FIXED?

Are the remaining tasks documented? Are there candidates to become Google Code-in tasks?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in

Only a note to say that, thanks to RobLa, I just learned to save a backup copy of MeetBot notes and logs using Pandoc:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

It's a command line application that converts from HTML to wikitext (among other combinations. You can copy the output manually and paste it to a wiki page obtaining a decent result. See

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings/2013-11-12

(In reply to comment #14)

Since we are hosting official meetings at #wikimedia-meetbot, [...]

We also have an unused #wikimedia-dev-meetings, can either be killed please? http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23wikimedia-dev-meetings/

(In reply to comment #14)

[...]

Since we are hosting official meetings at #wikimedia-meetbot, how can we help
pushing this report to RESOLVED FIXED?

[...]

Especially, what is needed to have meetbot attend #wikimedia-office (as well)?

(In reply to comment #17)

Especially, what is needed to have meetbot attend #wikimedia-office (as
well)?

(Or only, so that we can reduce channel entropy by redirecting #wikimedia-meetbot somewhere else.)

The meetbot I have setup was merely an experiment I did during a lunch break. I think it would be better maintained on toolslabs/bot infrastructure on labs. There is a strong bot operators community who already proven they can manage bots properly.

I will be more than happy to dig on the instance and extract all the configuration steps. Comment #6 gives some clue but is not ideal.

If you guys can find a bot operator, let it contact me and I can dump my brain to them. To someone who knows about toollabs/bot infra already, it should take roughly two hours to setup the new bot.

(In reply to comment #14)

"EXPERIMENTAL !!!! Logs will be deleted randomly ..."

Since we are hosting official meetings at #wikimedia-meetbot, how can we help
pushing this report to RESOLVED FIXED?

I see it no different than Etherpad, People are responsible for their groups own logs.

(In reply to comment #19)

There is a strong bot operators community who already proven they can manage
bots properly.

Can we just ask an existing bot then? One running on a production-like server rather than an experimental services host, ideally. I'm sure jeremyb can recommend one.

I dont have the time to maintain Meetbot myself. It is really a proof of concept and that would be better maintained by the bot community. I dont think there is any need to host that in production.

(In reply to comment #19)

The meetbot I have setup was merely an experiment I did during a lunch
break.
I think it would be better maintained on toolslabs/bot infrastructure on
labs.
There is a strong bot operators community who already proven they can manage
bots properly.

[...]

+1. I've squatted https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/ for now; if someone wants to do the actual work :-), ping me or a Tools admin in Cloud-Services or on wiki.

(In reply to comment #15)

Only a note to say that, thanks to RobLa, I just learned to save a backup
copy
of MeetBot notes and logs using Pandoc:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

It's a command line application that converts from HTML to wikitext (among
other combinations. You can copy the output manually and paste it to a wiki
page obtaining a decent result. See

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings/2013-11-12

MeetBot has native support to write logs in MediaWiki format (and optionally upload them to a wiki); see https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wm-labs-meetbot-test/2014/wm-labs-meetbot-test.2014-02-07-13.51.wiki for a (very unillustrative :-)) example.

So as I understand it the meetbot is now running on toolabs. We might want to migrate the logs from http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/ and put them there then I can delete the old instance.

I can not connect on integration-meetbot right now though :(

(In reply to comment #25)

So as I understand it the meetbot is now running on toolabs. We might want
to
migrate the logs from
http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/ and
put them there then I can delete the old instance.

I can not connect on integration-meetbot right now though :(

That's right, I have a MeetBot instance running on Tools and listening in #wikimedia-office, so I think this bug is resolved. I'll post a note on wikitech-l for the broader audience.

I have added you to Tools and the service group meetbot, so you should be able to upload it on tools-*. Otherwise I could just "wget -r" and sort it in.

Just a caveat (you mentioned it as well): Nobody should rely on meetbot for archival purposes as it's not backed up in any reliable way. Meeting minutes must be uploaded to a wiki, posted on a mailing list or added to a repository.

(In reply to comment #25)

So as I understand it the meetbot is now running on toolabs. We might want
to migrate the logs from
http://integration-meetbot.instance-proxy.wmflabs.org/wikimedia-meetbot/ and
put them there then I can delete the old instance.

Filled as bug 61128 and assigned to Tim :-]